Are Your Partners Engaged?

Source: CPA Trendlines

The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from an article by August J. Aquila and Robert J. Lees.

Although the whole purpose of engaging the partners is to commit them to the firm's future, they also have to see a personal upside in the final destination. That upside can take many forms, but it has to be spelled out. If, for example, achieving scale is achievable only through a merger, the likely impact of the merger on partner earnings must be addressed.

Measuring progress

There must be clarity about the points the firm should reach at different times and how success will be measured. Progress against the targets should be shared across the partner group together with the reasons the firm achieved the targets or failed to do so. If the firm failed to reach the target, then how it plans to achieve it in the future should be part of the sharing and subsequent discussion.

Highly engaged partners “walking together”

We use the concept of walking together to describe the whole partner group actively committing to making the vision a reality even though some partners may not agree with all the elements.

In our over twenty years of working in professional services firms, one of the things that is absolutely clear is that engagement only comes with active involvement in the key decisions that impact the firm. Another thing that is absolutely clear is that highly engaged partners perform at a much higher level – bringing benefits to the firm in all its markets.

For the complete article, read “Every Partner's First Question: ‘What's in It for Me?'”

From CPA Trendlines, August 28, 2013, http://cpatrendlines.com.